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I was excited and wanted to share my latest hot deal score. Yesterday MusiciansFriend had the MXL 550/551R Studio Microphone Kit on sale as part of their stupid deal of the day sale, which I grabbed for just $59 after cash back. I currently have a pair of the 990's condenser mics and I have been very pleased for what I paid. Now I am up to 3 MXL large diaphragm condensers, 1 MXL pencil condenser, 3 Shure 57's, and a Shure 58 to fill out all of the XLR connectors on my Tascam USB interface. Any suggestion on how to get the best sound with these mics, mods, or reviews? Any suggestion on a good reasonably priced preamp to run these mics into?
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Last edited by Wittgenstein; 02-15-2013, 06:12 PM. -
Do you have a preamp now? As far as mic mods, there's a lot of info at yahoo micbuilders group (one example: a high frequency peaking attenuation mod by "ricardo"(Richard Lee, who apparently used to work for Calrec who makes pro studio gear such as consoles, mics, etc.) for mics with Schoeps type circuits and a large diaphragm capsule of the type in Neumann U87s.
For the SM57/58, if the mic pre input it's plugged into has a relatively high impedance, this can cause ringing in the high frequencies which can adversely affect the sound. An easy mod is to add a resistor in parallel w/the mic output to more correctly terminate the transformer secondary (inside the Shure mic) to around 800 ohms (to more efficiently pass the signal--that is, obtain less signal voltage loss--a higher input impedance is better (usually about 10x the mic impedance which would be around 3k is recommended (since the actual impedance is 310 ohms)) but worse for the ringing (a resonant peak in the highs which I think is inherent to the transformer in the SM57/58). Also, for the SM57/58, because the output is low, it seems to work better in general with a mic pre capable of 50dB or 60dB of gain (about 300 times, and 1000 times respectively) having adequately low noise. I goof around (mod) sometimes with the mixer section in a Tascam 488mkII occasionally (which apparently has a typical budget mixer type mic pre--which isn't really surprising), and *I think* the max gain is 40dB (100 times), which means for 1 Pascal (unit of sound pressure) the output of the mic should be around 1.58mV. So for max gain, 1.58mV * 100 = 158mV(actually should be slightly less), but the mixer wants to see line level which is around 300mV, so I think this was leading to my subjective perception of the mic "sounding weak" (I also have a Rode NT2 large diaphragm condenser which has something like 15mV per Pascal output IIRC and this doesn't give me the impression of "sounding weak"). -
Just the preamps that are built into my Tascam M-164UF.Originally posted by dai h. View PostComment
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